InDesign, the basics

Member lesson

Text frames, threading and styles

Lesson 3 of 7 in InDesign, the basics.

Checked against the makers' documentation on 9 October 2026.

Create CONSISTENT Designs With Character & Paragraph Styles In InDesign! | Design Tutorial · Gareth David Studio
Lesson

Text in InDesign sits in text frames. Draw one with the Type tool and type, or let InDesign make one when you paste or place text. Each frame has an in port and an out port. Threading joins the out port of one frame to the in port of the next, so a single story runs across columns and pages and keeps running when you edit it. Empty ports mark the start and end of a story, and arrows show a link. A red plus sign in an out port means overset text, words with nowhere left to go.

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  1. Question 1, locked

    A red plus sign appears in the out port of the last text frame in a story. What does it mean?

    • The frame is threaded to a frame on another page
    • There is overset text with no frame left to hold it
    • The paragraph style has been overridden by hand
    • The text contains a word the spell checker does not know
  2. Question 2, locked

    You double-click a port to break the thread between two frames. What happens to the text that was in the second frame?

    • It is deleted from the document
    • It moves into a new frame on the pasteboard
    • It becomes overset, and no text is deleted
    • It flows onto the next page automatically
  3. Question 3, locked

    A plus sign appears beside a paragraph style's name in the Paragraph Styles panel. What does it tell you?

    • Text using the style has been changed by hand
    • The style is based on another style
    • The style was loaded from another document
    • The style is used on more than one page

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